Obama's soft-media strategy

President Barack Obama has been taking a lot of questions in the two months since his last press conference or national news interview. He’s just been doing them with ESPN, Entertainment Tonight, People Magazine and FM radio stations around the country, mostly to talk local sports and regional cuisine.

This isn’t a mistake. Even at the height of a campaign in which they’ve been firing hard at Mitt Romney and trying to keep hold of the news cycle, Obama’s reelection staffers are pretty sure most voters aren’t tuning in.

“People get their news in many different ways,” Obama campaign spokeswoman Jen Psaki told POLITICO. “Sometimes it’s turning on ‘Entertainment Tonight’ and seeing what the latest news is out there.”

Psaki said the president will be doing a variety of media appearances in the coming weeks with both national and local outlets, but for now, “We’re reaching an audience that may not be paying attention to the day-to-day political back and forth.”

That also lets them avoid the back-and-forth with the national press corps for much lighter outlets. Friday, Obama was behind closed doors at the White House to cap off a week in which Mitt Romney announced his running mate and Obama’s own vice president lit up controversy. But he was on the air: Obama called in to a New Mexico morning radio show to weigh in on “Call Me Maybe,” his favorite work-out songs and his ideal super power (he chose speaking any foreign language, though “the whole flying thing is pretty good”). The exchange ended with one co-host Kiki Garcia giggling, “I just flirted with the President of the United States of America.”

Obama’s not the only one. Romney has been more available recently — including two news conferences just this week — but before that had done only one since May. He even spurned U.S. reporters in favor of a British press availability on his recent overseas trip. And the day after he tapped Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate, the GOP ticket (and their wives) gave the first sit-down interview to … People magazine.

Obama himself has often complained about the media’s focus on trivialities over substance. But the anti-Beltway press sentiment is one that Obama himself has echoed on the trail, saying that the concerns of the national press corps and the the American people are wildly different.

“What the American people hear and what the press corps want to focus on are two very different things,” Obama told “Entertainment Tonight,” about ongoing questions regarding Vice President Joe Biden’s controversial quip about Republicans putting Americans back in “chains.”

Obama points to his failure to communicate as one of the single largest problems of his presidency, but media exposure has always proved tricky for him. In 2008, he was clearly helped, despite the knocks — including the famous “celebrity” ad from John McCain — from making stops like Ellen and Oprah a regular part of his routine. Even then, though, he was chided for giving an October 2008 interview to Mario Lopez on “Extra,” after a month without a press conference. And in 2009, his media handlers yanked him back in the face of withering criticism that he’d overexposed himself and the presidency in a way that was bad for the presidency and bad politics too.